On Prayer: A Raid On The Unspeakable (2024)

Photo Baz Ratner

“At some time we should make the decision to enter the divine darkness of the Jesus prayer, which is Mount Sinai or Mount Tabor, which is where we will meet God.”

Archimandrite Hierotheos Vlachos

It’s always the vulnerability that strikes me. The closing of my eyes, the shifting of weight onto my knees, the defenceless of that moment. I am a little bird peering up from the nest. I don’t feel heroic but diminished, and accommodating some usually disguised fragility. I feel my appropriate shape in the universe. This isn’t a moment of accomplishment, rather sending a voice to the presence that enables me life. The notion that anyone would be listening is rather extraordinary. And we have made this outrageous presumption for thousands of years.

There’s an antique belief that to pray is to sail out into a pregnant darkness where we will encounter God. That a prayer is as mighty as a Sinai or Tabor, as deep as the sea of Galilee. It’s that notion that causes the ancient man inside me to lean forward. Much of my life he’s not convinced by. This weathered old one is happiest out in the roaring forties with the Ancient of Days. He’s enjoyed enough of land-life.

Honestly, my prayers have sometimes been a gabble. Booted along by occasional terrors or a shopping list of want or a fumbling recital of various friends I’d wish protection over – when I remember to ask. With my prayers, I would usually sail to nowhere, ascend nowhere. They were mostly just keeping my neurosis company, toddler prayers I suppose. Other than the Lord’s Prayer – so combed over it went down with no thought at all – I would have been suspicious of any set prayers, because it was interfering with my personal freedom, man.

I don’t think I respected prayers or people that prayed. It seemed beige and a bit exhausted. It was something folks did when they’d rather given up. I would smile pityingly as they said that they would pray for little old me. Hah. I was out there in the world, being dramatic, making moves baby. They were the ones who needed a prayer. I would pat their heads and tell them to meditate. Oh dear.

I knew crisis prayers would have more vim attached – no atheist in a foxhole. The kind of fervour that arises from some kind of drama, that tends to be what we associate with ‘real prayer’. That’s what I would have regarded as a prayer that lights up God’s switch line. And maybe they would. There are miraculous examples, but there are also cases where nothing much seems to happen at all. Think of the courage of ‘thy will be done’ when you’re crucified in the underworld of your terror. Well, it’s ghastly. Prayer never feels more real than those moments.

Prayer comes from the Old French prier which actually means “to request”, so maybe the shopping list notion isn’t that recent. It’s often connected with a robust desire to stay alive. We pray to petition our fate. But over the years I would have been around a fair few approaches: I’ve seen Sufis whirling, I’ve sat in the smoke of the midnight longhouse as First Nations folks danced their prayers, I’ve seen Christians speak in languages I don’t understand with their arms extended, I’ve sat quietly with the Quakers, rarely a peep from them. Sometimes prayers seem about making an interior contact, at other times wildly extroverted with many gradients between the two. It can be alarmingly casual or distressingly ornate. It has bells and smells, it has no bells and smells, it’s in remote chapels, it’s happening on the dance floor, you cantake your pick.

What would seem to unite the encounters and the accoutrements is focus on what’s been called ‘vertical attention’: we are stretching ourselves through word and movement to contact John Moriarty’s divine ground. It’s not just personal display we are after, but some kind of return message. We are looking to connect with the source.

A prayer shouldn’t be a spell, though magic in the most redemptive sense should be present. Not magic as a bending of existence to your will, but magic as the capacity for wonder and trust in a God that can do all. We are because he is reminds Rowan Williams. He loves us, wants to hear from us, and we don’t have to go round the houses to get his attention.

Prayers degenerate into grubby formulas when they are cosmically on the take, they are raised to spiritual poetry when they have blessing and gratitude at their core. But to relegate magic entirely from praying is to shoot the bird out of the sky. When I attend Divine Liturgy I am altered the moment I walk through the door. In the darkness I light candles for the dead, kiss icons, prostrate on the cold stone floor, chant or sing prayers and scripture over and over, imbibe sacred incense, stay standing in sometimes discomfort, already weakened by fast. And then, at the height of the ceremony, we eat our God. Sounds pretty magical to me. When I emerge at the end, I am in no doubt whatsoever that something has just happened.

I love the physicality of the encounter, the engagement of the senses, the fleshly embodiment of the ceremony. In the words of Philip and Carol Zaleski in their book Prayer: A History: “It was necessary and inevitable, and not a matter for Christians to regret, that the magic of the gospel would partake of the magic of the ancient world and would commingle with the folk magic of many cultures to which Christianity spread. The relics, rosary beads, statues, icons, medals, and votive offerings that line the old highways of Europe, and especially the pilgrimage routes; the magical uses of familial prayers; the vigils, pilgrimages, processions, novenas, and litanies of the faithful – all these are signs not of atavism or degeneration, but rather of a fully realised culture of prayer.”

But there are differences between old and new. Plenty. To the early Christians prayer was not usually a loquacious recital like their neighbours the pagans, rather an impassioned plea, a loving of their enemy, a call to be emboldened to spread the good news, to wish courage to not just their immediate community but all over the Mediterranean. After the martyrdom of both Peter and Paul, public preaching briefly tailed off (there are exceptions), though continued in the houses of believers. Prayer however, was everywhere. The immediacy of the prayers mirrored the perception of a God who had a heart for their suffering and was attending to their speech.

Over time these early believers came to develop a hardy patience for a response to their prayers, as well as the occasional lightning-quick development. As the scholar Alan Krieider reminds us, part of prayer’s attraction in those communities was that it helped them cope. Life was often short, uncertain and persecution loomed: you would want to be communing regularly with God. It stabilised as the world lurched. And personal reconciliation was central, you were not to leave a quibble unattended before praying, you were to get right with your neighbour for the greater spiritual good. Such prayer ennobled the Christian to live with more confidence, to have more surety in their actions. It seems that the attraction of the early communities was not through rabid evangelising but a lifestyle that was uncommon and rather fearless.

Yeshua uses prayer as nothing less than spiritual combat with the Luciferic: “this kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer,” he says in Mark 9:29. He is rarely more direct than at these moments: “come out of him”, “be clean”, “little girl get up!”the force of his words turn crisis to rapture in a moment. He’s not cloaked in recital or obscuration, he simply couldn’t be clearer. Being part of God there is a rapidity of effect that we are still scratching our head at two thousand years later. And yet he urges his disciples to do the same. There’s nothing wistful or opaque in his spiritual technologies. In the time of catastrophic import, Gethsemane, he falls to the ground as he prays – let this cup pass from me – and in the next breath asks only for his Father’s will to happen. He prays for those often confused and competitive companions his disciples, he prays that we love ones who aim their malice towards us, he prays continually and does his worship early in the morning, out in the groves of wild solitude.

John Chrysostom wrote that prayer acted as a harbour for those blown by the storm, was a staff for the weak limbed, an anchor for the shipwreck, a treasury for the poor. It was considered access to pleasure, an experience of joy and a practice that gave horror to demons. From his point of view, no Christian should be anything but delighted to swim in those luxuriant waters of devotion. Prayer is a form of self-regulating where we grow in consciousness of our true nature. Prayer that is not static but dynamic, even within liturgical repetitions. We are in movement, falling yet deeper into the mind of God. Prayer lubricates our acts of charity, gifting poetic resonance to the small course-correctives needed for a day trying to live in the wonderful trouble of the Christ-light.

In the Divine Liturgy it is perceived the saints are even closer than usual. As we sing our prayers, St John of Kronstadt would claim that he could hear Moses and Zacharias singing, even Mary on occasion. Our prayers are wafted aloft by holy ancestors. In the Eastern mind all the saints are gathered with Christ, everyone happily inside his wider body. It’s lively and bustling, even when we ourselves may be praying alone and desperate in a bedsit or moonlit hill. We are actually buoyed and surrounded. Such prayer overcomes the notion of an abyss between humans and God. Such an abyss would be a hell-state. And to overcome such a thing would be to give the prayer an address, and that address would be Christ.

I’ve written a lot about John Moriarty I know. John, an Irishman, was a sometimes philosopher, sometimes gardener, sometimes storyteller with an extraordinary way of looking at the world. As I think about prayer, I’m thinking about a story he used to tell, the story of Big Mike. Big Mike returns to the cottage of his childhood on a remote island. Over time he is reintroduced to his neighbours and starts to fish with the men. After a time he’s going out alone, and far from the shore. This is terrifying behaviour, and hard to fathom. After a time the settlement realises he’s out there in the carnivorous depths with no nets. What on earth, what in God’s name is he doing? Finally to his friend Ned he explains the nature of his doings:

Night after night, I cast the net of my mind into the ocean of experience. Into it also I cast the net of my heart. Every morning, hauling the net of my mind, I hoped that in it I would find the great creed, the great knowing. But I never did. Neither did I, hauling the net of my heart, find it in the great emotion, the great saving passion or rapture. In both nets, from time to time, I found marvels. But I didn’t find final healing.

Final healing isn’t healing of the mind, nor is it healing of the heart. It is healing beyond them, into Divine Ground. Divine Ground within. Divine Ground below passion and love in the human heart, below knowing in the human mind.

I rowed myself out, and it’s true Ned, it’s true.

Out there, in that Divine Dark,

Out there, in that Divine Deep,

The fishing, not fishing at all,

Is blessedness, is bliss.

In Orthodoxy we would call that meeting the Uncreated Light. And a way to get there is through Hesychasm. Hesychasm is a very deep form of stillness, often aided by a version of the Jesus prayer:

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.

Though repeated it’s not a mantra, it’s not a spell, but an act of extremely beautiful contrition. It’s powerful. Powerful beyond pronouncements of self-loathing and masoch*stic admonishments. It is a settling of your knees into the millennia weathered grooves of other pilgrims’ prostrations. It is a taking of that proper shape I mentioned. There’s not much to ask for at that moment, so deep is the experience announcing itself.

A wilderness idea from a Christian source is that this is only possible when the mind is nested within the terrain of the heart. What could that mean? There would be any number of ways to describe such a thing and all of them would fall grievously short. My own small experience has been like this: I sit in a darkened room and am still for a few minutes. When my breathing has naturally slowed, I repeat the prayer. Each turn of the words are a universe within themselves, they have the pregnancy of space between repetitions and are not blurted rapid fire. I’m not trying to ramp anything up. I don’t visualise anything, religious or otherwise. I do pay attention to what I’m saying. After about ten minutes there is the distinct sensation that the prayer is now being repeated even in my silence, like the turning of a mill wheel. And yes, abstract as it may sound, it feels as if that prayer is issuing from what I can only call the heart.

For me this heart is a place that feels both wholesome and immeasurably deep. This Christian kind of heart at least. What we could call the Romantic heart is often a more conflicted terrain. The Christian heart at best feels receptive, quiet, patient, denuded of urgency. The prayer rests there, like a pulse. Any wishes I may have God already knows about, and the urge to petition at such a moment is absolutely redundant. For a while, I am in the Garden, or as near as a human can be.

This kind of terrain would not be regarded as the exclusive territory of monks or nuns, but a ground of orientation available to all of us. But our monks and nuns are less distracted than we are, more athletic in their focus, more acute in their theosis. In this way they point towards the best in us. In this way they are the most profoundly human of us. Human in a fashion that points towards Edenic design.

A hermit may ask a visitor:

Do you come from the world?

I do.

How is it out there?

Fr. Philaret of Karoulia

Praying from this hermit place is not worldly praying, not secular wish-listing, but a re-orientation to absolute poverty of spirit. That takes a moment to understand. Poverty in the sense of clinging to nothing that rinky-dink society dangles in front of you, but a mighty, lion-like poverty that moves mountains. Poverty is an upside down, Christ-side-up form of strength. An eye of the needle-ness strength. Riches abide, but not the ones we’re meant to be castrating our every waking hour to achieve. Humility of soul. Persian poets say at some point we all must walked naked on the road. It’s the only sane thing to do. It’s how you spot a human being. A hermit would be a valuable energy for us to contemplate; not some crabby old soul who gripes at daylight, but someone who has sat in the shuddering crucible of prayer and been cooked by it, changed by it. Someone wizened and friendly with solitude. We should be paying more attention to our elders.

I would say yes to a prayer that reaches out over the companionable objects of our day, yes to prayers for more charity, resilience, good-naturedness, and also a listening kind of praying that is tucked somewhere always in our heart, mystically turning to ever greater reality. What a woeful thing it would be to be denied prayer, to be numbed to its gratitude. We can live without a great deal, but to live entirely without prayer would leave us lesser human beings. Prayers change our relationships with pretty much everything. In the tribulation of night I turn the wheel of my prayer rope and steer my ship over woeful seas, in the brightness of a longed-for dawn I stare east and am deep-rooted in the wallop of my amazement.

In the end prayer isn’t something we do it becomes something that we are.

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Christ Is Risen!

Happy Pascha.

Parzival will be back next week.

A Raid On The Unspeakable is a wonderful phrase from Thomas Merton.